Three (Surprising) Reasons for Poor Quality Translations

Usually, when someone tells you that your translations are poor, the first tendency is to blame the translators. Blaming the people doing the work might make sense. However, in my experience, the cause of poor translation is often not the person trying their best to translate the content. The problem lies every place else.

Here are three reasons your translations might be of poor quality:

Your source content is poor.

Your workflow isn’t working.

Your translation memories are a mess.

Poor Quality Translations Reason 1: Source Content

Often, when a translation is of poor quality, you don’t need to look any farther than the source content itself. There are many things that can be wrong with the source content. My examples are for English source content, but you can find similar issues in other source languages. Here are some source English issues I run into all the time:

Long Sentences

Do you know how long we’ve been (I’ve been) talking about the scourge of the long sentence? Gosh, it’s been years. Yet, time and again, I still find source content riddled with sentences that are 30, 40, 50, and even 95 words. Yes, 95 words is my new all-time high. And I wish I was joking, but I’m not. Long sentences are difficult to understand in English. They become impossible to translate.

Let me state it again – with feeling…

Your sentences should contain fewer than 26 words.

Grammar Errors

If your source content has grammar and style errors in it, translating that content can be a real challenge. Do everyone a favor and keep those (short) sentences grammatically correct.

Tone of Voice

The nature of our content conversations with our customers has become very chummy. A chummy tone of voice is often grammatically incorrect and usually full of colloquialisms. When we create content in this way, we often use sentence fragments, made up words, and all sorts of punctuation. Very friendly may be your brand’s tone of voice. But, remember that chummy doesn’t necessarily translate.

I once worked with a customer that continued to send new and revised content to the translators up to, and including, the day that the translations were due to be returned. At this company, the notion of “freezing” the content was as foreign as the languages they were using. It seemed that every day, new and revised content was forwarded to translation. And every day, there was some type of translation crisis. No surprise! This customer wanted my advice on changing translation companies. Clearly, changing vendors was not going to solve the problem. Changing the workflow and the unrealistic demands on the translators were needed.

Another problem with workflow is the lack of in-country review (ICR). It continues to amaze me that there are companies that do not do a review of every language. In some languages, content is simply tossed out to the public without a second set of trained eyes evaluating it first. Don’t let this happen to you. If you are going to go through the time, effort, and expense of translating your content, you need to have someone – preferably an employee who is a native speaker – review the content. Otherwise, you risk having inaccurate or poorly translated content floating around.

[Tweet “It continues to amaze me that there are companies that do not do a review of every language. #xl8”]

The exact same translation for the exact same segment listed 30+ times.

The source and translation pair mismatched – in other words, the source and target no longer lined up in the TM. This resulted in an incorrect translation being paired with the source segment – for a huge number of translation units.

Translating content from bloated or corrupted TMs makes the task difficult, if not impossible. The quality of the translation suffers and the cost to you rises quickly. To keep your TMs in working order, someone should clean up the TMs after each translation is complete. If that’s not possible, then the TMs should be scrubbed on a timed and consistent basis. If not, the TM is likely to end up being marginally usable. Sometimes, that is worse than not having a TM at all.

What About the Translators?

It is possible that the problem with your translation is the fault of the translator. There are people in the field who are less adept at their job. It does happen. However, if you see a systemic issue with your translations, for example, all or most of the translations are problematic, I suggest you look elsewhere than the people doing the work. The problem could lie in what you provide, how you provide it, or the resources the translators have to do their job.

Val Swisher is the CEO of Content Rules. She is a well-known expert in global content strategy, content development, and terminology management. Using her 20 years of experience, Val helps companies solve complex content problems by analyzing their content and how it is created.

When not blogging, Val can be found sitting behind her sewing machine working on her latest quilt. She also makes a mean hummus.

I recently had an experience that illustrates your first point. A client in Germany sent me an English translation of a brochure written by their Spanish subsidiary. My contact said he was unhappy with the translation.
Perhaps because he knows I speak some Spanish, he also sent me the original Spanish version.
He was certainly right about the English version. Several sections were gibberish. But going back to the original, with my Spanish-English dictionary in hand, I couldn’t make sense of the original either.
So I sent one of the sections to a contact at their U.S. home office. Unlike me, she’s a native Spanish speaker. I thought she’d tell me where the translator and I had gone wrong–especially since she’s more familiar with the technology than either of us as well. Imagine my surprise when she confirmed my opinion that the section made no sense in either language.
I suggested different language to the client and told them their translator wasn’t at fault. The problem was with whoever wrote the original.

Thanks for your story, Chris. I think it is a really good example, particularly since we in the US seem to think that everyone speaks English – so naturally, the English translation would be pristine. Very interesting to have this additional perspective.

Deb Lockwood

Thank you for this excellent advice, Val! I just purchased your new book and look forward to reading it this week.

Thank you for an article which I second 100%! One more point for the “bad source” section: source content not written by a native speaker. Many multinational companies seem to force their employees to write content in English, though it is not their native language. (Or the employees might overestimate their knowledge.) I had many cases where I (being German) only had to replace the English words in the source with German ones and had a perfect German text. However, I knew that any native speaker of English would have a hard time understanding the source because of the unusual syntax and German expressions that had been translated into English 1:1. Example: Would you know what it means to “put a machine into water”?*.

And I sometimes get source material from French companies (in English) that I could not translate if French was not my second working language, as they use French syntax and expressions and simply put the English words in (had a “breach of stock” in my last one – “rupture de stock” means “to run out of stock”).

I often thought that it would have been better if they had their content written in the native language of the writer and then used a good translator for the English version.

Oh yes, Heike!! Trying to translate English that was written by non-native speakers is a recipe for double disaster. Not only do you have to be fluent in English and your translation language, you need to be fluent in the native language of the writer. What a nightmare! I will definitely add that to the list. Thanks!

Heike Kurtz

Thank you for an article which I second 100%! One more point for the “bad source” section: source content not written by a native speaker. Many multinational companies seem to force their employees to write content in English, though it is not their native language. (Or the employees might overestimate their knowledge.) I had many cases where I (being German) only had to replace the English words in the source with German ones and had a perfect German text. However, I knew that any native speaker of English would have a hard time understanding the source because of the unusual syntax and German expressions that had been translated into English 1:1. Example: Would you know what it means to “put a machine into water”?*.

And I sometimes get source material from French companies (in English) that I could not translate if French was not my second working language, as they use French syntax and expressions and simply put the English words in (had a “breach of stock” in my last one – “rupture de stock” means “to run out of stock”).

I often thought that it would have been better if they had their content written in the native language of the writer and then used a good translator for the English version.

Oh yes, Heike!! Trying to translate English that was written by non-native speakers is a recipe for double disaster. Not only do you have to be fluent in English and your translation language, you need to be fluent in the native language of the writer. What a nightmare! I will definitely add that to the list. Thanks!

ConnieHinesDorothyProvine

Grammar errors are one of my major pet peeves. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen “would of” or “your crazy”.

It especially irritates me when people say “I wish I would have done X”. It’s “I wish that I HAD done X”.

I have been a translator for decades, working with a national standards institute (DIN) among other clients, and I have also managed localizations. I cannot tell you how pleased I am to see somebody in an influential position speaking these truths! I have often been given rubbish to translate: it is very odd how many people just assume that a text makes sense when they send it out for translation, without submitting it beforehand to an in-house (or other) editor, or even having it peer-reviewed.

In order to avoid some of the obstacles you enumerate, I have found the best solution is to have two people working together on a project:
1) an engineer or similar SME
– whose expertise is in the requisite area and
– whose native language is the same as the source to be translated.
2) a translator
– who is a native speaker of the target language and
– who has access to dictionaries in the right technical domain.

For software, I select individual translators who:
– have access to the software with appropriate content in the database and sample configurations and
– who either localize the GUI themselves or have the appropriately identified, already localized strings for it.

In addition, I give the translators license to discuss with the writers where necessary. This often leads to immediate improvement in the original source text, which can (and should) be instantly conveyed to translators working on the same project in other languages.